In the week’s least surprising news, Amazon\u2019s reinvention of its Alexa voice assistant has reportedly fallen even further behind. According to Bloomberg, the launch of a new Alexa \u2014 billed as a smarter, more capable AI-powered voice assistant \u2014 has been pushed back. Again. \u201cA person familiar with the matter said Alexa AI teams were recently told that their target deadline had been moved into 2025,\u201d writes Bloomberg. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In June, Fortune reported that the AI-powered Alexa \u2014 which Amazon demoed last September and said would be available for a free preview on its Alexa-fitted devices in the U.S. \u2014 is not even close to being ready. Former employees told the publication that the company doesn\u2019t have enough data nor access to the chips needed to run the large language model (LLM) powering the new version of its voice assistant. The company also reportedly deprioritized Alexa AI to focus on building generative AI for its cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amazon said its former employees are incorrect and uninformed on its current Alexa AI efforts, and that the Amazon Artificial General Intelligence team has access to both in-house Trainium chips and Nvidia\u2019s graphics processing units (GPUs).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have already integrated generative AI into different components of Alexa, and are working hard on implementation at scale\u2014in the over half a billion ambient, Alexa-enabled devices,\u201d an Amazon spokesperson previously told Quartz in a statement. \u201cWe are excited about what we\u2019re building and look forward to delivering it for our customers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Amazon\u2019s third-quarter earnings call, Jassy said Amazon has a \u201cvery deep partnership with Nvidia\u201d and plans to \u201cbe their lead partner on most of their new chips.\u201d Production of the second version of Amazon\u2019s training chips, Trainium, will start ramping up in the next few weeks, Jassy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bloomberg reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has yet to convey a compelling vision for an AI-powered Alexa to the company. While he\u2019s said publicly, \u201cWe continue to re-architect the brain of Alexa … \u201d, there\u2019s been scant information about what an LLM-powered Alexa will bring to its millions of users \u2014 beyond being able to converse more naturally. More importantly, it seems Amazon has yet to prove it can do this without diminishing the features customers use the assistant for every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the company searches for its vision, Jassy has installed a new head of the devices and services division under which Alexa falls. Panos Panay has been at the company for a year now, and Bloomberg reports the former head of Microsoft\u2019s Surface division has \u201cbrought a focus on higher-quality design to a group adept at utilitarian gadgets.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amazon’s prior tact of making copious amounts of cheap hardware at the expense of better software is partly why Alexa hasn\u2019t gotten measurably smarter over the last decade. However, with better hardware and a focus on building on Alexa\u2019s strength, rather than simply turning it into a chatbot, the company could recapture Jeff Bezos\u2019s original vision of creating Star Trek\u2019s \u201cComputer.\u201d But whatever the plan is for a new Alexa, it looks like it won’t be here anytime soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the week’s least surprising news, Amazon\u2019s reinvention of its Alexa voice assistant has reportedly fallen even further behind. According to Bloomberg, the launch of a new Alexa \u2014 billed as a smarter, more capable AI-powered voice assistant \u2014 has been pushed back. Again. \u201cA person familiar with the matter said Alexa AI teams were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-amazon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}